But the Internet-in-a-suitcase doesn’t work. In a test at the Occupy D.C. protests last fall, activists found that even when their routers were running smoothly, when they tried to connect to the broader Internet, it was too slow to be of any use. In an increasingly cloud-based Internet, any LAN is severely hobbled without access to the broader Net. Applications such as Gmail, Twitter and YouTube require what engineers call backhaul, or a connection to the Internet’s global infrastructure. The problem isn’t the construction of a single network, but rather a working internetwork, one that links to the existing infrastructure of a nation’s telecommunications system—precisely the ones under the strictest control. An Internet-in-a-suitcase risks being the connectivity equivalent of a gleaming new warship with no way of getting to open water. A LAN may still be useful for limited communication, but not if the revolution is to be tweeted.
While readers familiar with Wallace’s Kenyon speech will find that most of the content has maintained intact, This is Water does include a single, but very substantial, revision that has raised some criticism. Following Wallace’s point about the mind being a “good servant and a terrible master,” Wallace states in the original speech: “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.” In This is Water, the final sentence from the quote above was taken out. This line was, in fact, a go-to line for the authors of many of Wallace’s obituaries, who see in this moment an ominous foreshadowing of his eventual suicide. For Tom Bissell, the textual excision is understandable because “Any mention of self-annihilation in Wallace’s work…now has a blast radius that obscures everything around it.” Thus, Bissell suggest that the oft-cited line might distract readers from the core elements of the speech.
Reception of the posthumously-published edition of Wallace’s speech has been divided in ways that point to, on one hand, the lasting power of the content of his speech, but also a concern about its place and meaning of a society that has had to “commence” going on without him. While reviews of the content of the speech have been almost uniformly positive, there has been criticism of the format of This is Water. After all, one may ask, does the omission of the line “they shoot the terrible master” and the stretching out of Wallace’s prose into sentence units refigure and protect an image of Wallace as the “Wise old fish?” Zach Baron of the Village Voice points out that lines like “I am not the wise old fish,” take on the feeling of zen mantras, certainly gaining emphasis, but perhaps doing so in the wrong way. Ultimately, he cannot shake the feeling that the format goes against the principles of the speech: “The net effect is to imply an entirely different kind of wisdom–of the Tuesdays With Morrie variety–than whatever actual wisdom is contained therein. ” Fans of the book, on the other hand, including the most “liked” Amazon review of the text, argue that the book format finally gives the speech the “stature it deserves,” and argue that the knee-jerk resistance tot he speech is evidence of the kind of cynicism that Wallace speaks out against in the speech. These debates also inevitably intersect with the question of whether Wallace’s speech was mostly to be taken as a survival guide to life within modern capitalism or an affirmation of it.
— viz.
The bandwidth is available, the images are there, and the robots and digital devices get plenty of look-in. Where did the people go? Where is the aura, where is the credibility? Are robots with cameras supposed to have our credibility for us? They don’t.We’re not going to be able to gloss over this gaping vacuity by “making the machines our friends.” Because they’re not our friends. Machines are never our friends, even if they’re intimates in our purses and pockets eighteen hours a day. They may very well be our algorithmic investors, but they’re certainly not our art critics, because at that, they suck even worse than they do at running our economy.
If machine vision was our pal, then we wouldn’t need James Bridle to assert that for us. We’d have an infallible Bridlebot, a Googleized visual search-engine that could generate as much aesthetics as we want.
That won’t happen. Why not? Because it is impossible. It’s as impossible as Artificial Intelligence, which is a failed twentieth-century research campaign, reduced to a sci-fi conceit. That’s why the “New Aesthetic” isn’t about “robot vision” from “digital devices,” even when it claims that, as a rhetorical gesture to grant itself some aura.
The New Aesthetic is comprehensible. It’s easier to perceive than, for instance, the “surrealism” of a fur-covered teacup. Your Mom could get it. It’s funny. It’s pop. It’s transgressive and punk. Parts of it are cute.It’s also deep. If you want to get into arcane matters such as interaction design, computational aesthetics, covert surveillance, military tech, there’s a lot of room for that activity in the New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic carries a severe, involved air of Pynchonian erudition.
It’s contemporary. It’s temporal rather than atemporal. Atemporality is all about cerebral, postulated, time-refuting design-fictions. Atemporality is for Zenlike gray-eminence historian-futurist types. The New Aesthetic is very hands-on, immediate, grainy and evidence-based. Its core is a catalogue of visible glitches in the here-and-now, for the here and for the now.
It requires close attention. If you want to engage with the New Aesthetic, then you must become involved with some contemporary, fast-moving technical phenomena. The New Aesthetic is inherently modish because it is ferociously attached to modish, passing objects and services that have short shelf-lives. There is no steampunk New Aesthetic and no remote-future New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic has no hyphen-post, hyphen-neo or hyphen-retro. They don’t go there, because that’s not what they want.
At some point when I was reading a long note—I think, given the tweet I sent out, it must have been note 110—I actually became so confused by how long it was going on that I wondered if there’d been some sort of coding error and I was actually in the main text. And then when the notes to the notes started appearing9 I became even more disoriented and even though the location indicator showed that I was all the way in the back of the “book”, since there was no “book” for me to flip pages through, that didn’t really convince me that I wasn’t in the main text. And since I hadn’t bookmarked the page I had been reading, the page with the link to the note I was now wandering through, there wasn’t any way for me to go back to where I was. I could only go forward, reading and reading until I got to the safety of “return to text.”After that point, every time I saw a numbered note, I wondered if it was going to be a short one or if it was going to take me down some rabbit hole. But I made a conscious decision not to care. I refused to bookmark the page I was currently reading. I gave in to the book, went where it led me, and trusted I would make my way back to where I was and that DFW would give me the help and pleasure I needed to keep going. I ceded all my authority to Infinite Jest.
Text lasts. It’s not platform-dependant, you don’t just get it from one source, read it in one place, understand it in one way. It is not dependent on technology: it is what we make technology out of. Code is text, it is the fundamental nature of technology. We’ve been trying for decades, since the advent of hypertext fiction, of media-rich CD-ROMs, to enhance the experience of literature with multimedia. And it has failed, every time.Yet we are terrified that in the digital age, people are constantly distracted. That they’re shallower, lazier, more dazzled. If they are, then the text is not speaking clearly enough. We are not speaking clearly enough. Like over-stuffed attendees at a dull banquet, the mind wanders. We are terrified that people are dumbing down, and so we provide them with ever dumber entertainment. We sell them ever greater distractions, hoping to dazzle them further.
Will the new Firestone, with its massive ranks of dead-tree media, attract student readers who have always read on screens? Will the new NYPL keep up its world-class collections of books in dozens of languages — Slavic, Semitic, and African — and the staff of specialists needed to keep finding and cataloguing them — books, most of them, that won’t be available in digital form in the foreseeable future? Will the new Firestone work as social space? Will the new NYPL still support scholars — especially the independent scholars who need it most — and give students a chance to know and love real books as well as their digital shadows? Can public library budgets support the constant upgrading needed to keep a digital workspace usable?The world’s full of confident experts who have answers to these questions. I’ve got nothing. My heart’s with what we’re doing in Firestone. My stomach hurts when I think about NYPL, the first great library I ever worked in, turned into a vast internet cafe where people can read the same Google Books, body parts and all, that they could access at home or Starbucks. And my head tells me that I can’t predict a thing because we’re living through a great revolution, and we don’t yet know what lies on the other side.
In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.
My ability to select the best candidates for our positions has been irreparably compromised by looking into their private lives. I’ve been “tainted” by knowledge of their sexual orientation, illnesses, religion, political affiliations, and other factors that expose us to anti-discrimination legislation. We can’t even claim that the employee improperly disclosed these matters to us, as we are the ones initiating the investigation of their private doings.Worse, I cannot manage these people once they’re hired. I would be diffident about censuring them or passing them over for advancement for fear of incurring a lawsuit that would be a distraction to our business and damaging to our reputation as fair employers.
Therefore, please consider this my formal resignation. The COO does not tell me how to write software, so I will not tell her how to set HR standards, but I would ask that you review this policy and ask whether it is truly in the company’s interest to indiscriminately dig through a candidates’ private lives. Either that, or we should move to a jurisdiction where we have zero exposure to legal consequences for discrimination.
“It is clear that the need for innovation has never been greater,” my old Economist colleague (and friend) Vijay Vaitheeswaran writes in his new book Need, Speed, and Greed. It may be clear to Vijay, but it’s not at all to me: The need for innovation in World War II, or the Irish potato famine, or in ending slavery, or at pretty much any randomly selected point in time in the past strikes me as about the same as its necessity today. Vijay’s case rests on the argument that we live in conspicuously heady times, an argument that is made by assertion. He goes on to say that “new ideas move to market faster than ever before.”But can we meaningfully measure the speed with which new ideas move to market? Alexander Graham Bell filed his patent for the telephone in February 1876. By April 1877, the first commercial telephone lines were being installed. Of course you can cherry-pick examples to show greater or slower speeds.